The Fleet Of Stars: Concluding Observations From The Current Rereading

Sometimes the Milky Way is described without being named, e.g.:

"...the galactic river encompassed him." (30, p. 382)

On Mars, download Guthrie visits David and Helen Ronay shortly after the violent deaths first of their daughter, Kinna, then of Kinna's fiancee, Fenn. Despite the somberness of this occasion, the natural setting seems hopeful:

"The sky was pale rose, bright with morning." (31, p. 392)

Life is always ending and beginning. See:

Sunset And Morning
Quit While You're A Head

By contrast with the Ronays:

"...grief of the Terran kind was unknown to Lunarians." (31, p. 394)

They really are different - can we say "alien"?

Chuan describes the attempted massive deception not as a "'...conspiracy...'" ("'That is an ugly word, captain.'") but as:

"'...a stratagem for a noble purpose and an end too great for you to imagine.'" (31, p. 396)

Buddhists have a concept of "skillful means." Thus, a hermit, realizing that a deer in a remote wood had not learned to fear human beings, tried to teach it that fear, and thus to save its life, by running toward it, waving his arms and yelling. His threatening behavior was a pretense but for a good end. But how much deception might be justified as "skillful means"? Chuan's explanation sounds sanctimonious:

"'Humans...organic beings, limited, fallible, reckless, greedy, often hideously cruel - should not run loose in the universe.'" (31, pp. 396-397)

Greedy? Cruel? Not when we are civilized and have no reason to fight for survival or to hoard limited resources. Do we fight for the air that we breathe? Yes, if we are in a space station and down to the last oxygen cylinder.

Chuan's false dichotomy between, on the one hand, a population intellectually stimulated not by the real universe but by an elaborate fiction dishonestly presented as the cosmic reality and, on the other hand:

"'...your warriors, hunters, butchers, bandits, carousers, criminals, grovelers in superstition, blood sacrificers - your leftover animality...'" (31, pp. 398-399)

- is fatuous. There are never just two options, one bad, the other worse. When discussing alternative social arrangements, we should never have been told that there was only one, demonstrably worse, alternative: totalitarianism.

But something much more interesting is happening:

"...things went on around the great black hole - monstrous forces, convulsions in space-time - which the scientists at Proserpina could not account for or even give a name to." (31, p. 396)

"'...what's really going on at the core of the galaxy.'
"Chuan's self-control wavered for a moment. 'I don't know what it is. I cannot comprehend. But the great equation, the ultimate summation, is clearly incomplete. I suspect that the new knowledge, the new physics, can lead to - a power to transform the universe.' He shuddered." (31, p. 397)

Often, Anderson underlines dialogue with the Pathetic Fallacy. Here, Chuan's wavering and shuddering serve the same purpose. But, if the great equation is now seen to be incomplete, then everyone needs to cooperate to understand what is really happening in reality.

Signing off till next month, tomorrow.

Galactography

To all blog readers:

please read or reread Sean M. Brooks' "Sector Governors in the Terran Empire," here;

please also read the combox for that article.

You will find (so far) 28 comments by:

Sean
Bob Hutchinson
me
Anonymous
Johan Ortiz

Bob comments on the distance of Alpha Crucis.
Anonymous, who is possibly also Bob, comments on the volumes of the Terran Empire.
Johan discusses galactography in detail.

Poul Anderson's Technic History presents data about the relative directions and distances of particular stars, planetary systems and inhabited or colonized planets. Are these data consistent and accurate? Were the distances known with accuracy when Anderson wrote these works? Might it be possible to update and revise the galactography of the History without, of course, tampering with the texts? As yet, Johan is the blog's resident expert.

Fenn And Guthrie

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 29.

Fenn meets the legendary download Guthrie and they join forces, initially just to learn the truth, not necessarily to oppose anyone else.

Maybe when Anderson wrote this novel, he knew of the Kuiper Belt but not of the Oort Cloud? Wiki indicates that comets originate in the latter, not in the former.

Guthrie's ship enters:

"...the marches of the Solar System, the domain of the comets. None showed to the eye or the ranging instruments. Millionfold though they were, the Kuiper Belt spread too vastly. Sol itself was no more than the brightest in the horde of stars, at the cold river of the Milky Way." (p. 366)

They have seen images of the "...cosmic cybercosm..." (ibid.) but will shortly learn that these images have been faked. Is this discovery an anticlimax to the novel?

Breath

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 27.

Remembering his murdered fiancee, Fenn reflects that she should be resurrected:

"Her ashes ought not to blow about forever across dead deserts. It was right that someday their atoms again form living flesh and beat in living blood. Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
"Fenn didn't recall where in his random reading he had seen that line. It didn't matter." (pp. 346-349)

But it does matter and googling gives us Ezekiel 37:9, yet another Biblical passage.

At the end of the preceding chapter, Chuan had coped with Kinna's death not by contemplating her resurrection but by reflecting that she was a small, haphazard fluctuation in reality. (p. 339)

Fenn: Approaching The Endgame

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 23-26.

Fenn, like Flandry, becomes engaged to a woman who believes in sex only within marriage and who is shot dead before they can be married. Kinna's insistence on sharing the risks during a gunfight with a band of Inrai, Martian Lunarian guerillas, gets her killed completely unnecessarily.

Fenn lists "Findings from across the whole electromagnetic spectrum..." and more (p.300):

radio waves kilometers in length;
microwaves;
infrared;
visible light;
ultraviolet;
X ray;
gamma rays;
particles;
gravitational waves;
supernova radiation;
radiation from colliding neutron stars and black holes;
images made by the lenses of galactic clusters and smaller bodies.

A black hole collision is a major event in Anderson's For Love And Glory. See here.

Rereading Chapter 26, we know that Chuan lies to Fenn about "'...a cosmic civilization...'" (p. 332) and this realization is sickening.

Aerial Life

Might a planet have a whole aerial ecology?

See the references to "aeromedusae" in:

Altai V
How The Ice Folk Wage War

See also:

A Jovian Epic
The Hidden Folk
The Hidden Folk II
Life In The Jovian Atmosphere
Life In The Jovian Atmosphere II
Life In The Jovian Atmosphere III
Down To Jupiter

In Julian May's Galactic Milieu, Caledonian colonists farm flying flora.

On Mars

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 22.

Pavonis Mons rises above Tharsis plateau. ("Tharsis" sounds ERBian: "Thark" and "Thoris.") There is "...aa lava..." and "...weather-polished pahoehoe..." (ibid.)

High on Pavonis Mons, Fenn and Kinna, surrounded by "...titanic black blocks and clinkers..." (ibid.), see obsidian pahoehoe, the rose plateau and a few ice-clouds floating in the deeply blue sky. Phobos and Deimos are almost lost among the stars which are as if seen from space. The Milky Way is:

"...a cold noiseless river..." (p. 287)

Screeds And Blights II

See Screeds And Blights.

I will shortly reread Seed Of Light by Edmund Cooper and find out for myself. According to Damon Knight:

the plot is fatuous;

all British politicians are presented as heroic idealists whereas all the Americans are presented as clownish demagogues;

after WWIII, glass-roofed cities build spaceships inside their domes so that takeoff will kill those left behind;

the voyage of one starship is a rewrite of Heinlein's "Universe";

about p. 130, a beautiful Stapledonian sweep emerges.

The Politicians
Poul Anderson showed politicians as rounded characters and presented sympathetic treatments of those that he disagreed with.

The Cities
Anderson's characters would not have built spaceships that would kill those left behind. Why did Cooper's? And why did I not see that this was "asinine" (Knight's word)? Young and not technically inclined, I assumed that there was some off-stage technical reason why it had to be done that way. Also, I probably thought that there was a mythical Mors ianua vitae, "Death is the door to life," significance to the arrangement.

Rewriting "Universe"?
"Universe" presents not only the generation ship (multi-generation, slower-than-light, interstellar spaceship) idea but also a later generation, unable to see outside the ship, who think that it is the universe. Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Clifford Simak and Edmund Cooper reworked the generation ship idea. Aldiss' and Simak's crews cannot see outside their ship but Anderson's and Cooper's can.

Screeds And Blights

Sometimes sf plots are blighted by blunders or "howlers" but I do not think that that is ever the case in the works of Poul Anderson unless anyone is able to cite an example? They must, at least, be rare. I should give examples of what I mean by blunders and this will be an opportunity to show by contrast how Anderson invariably gets it right.

Time travel non sequiturs annoy me most, e.g., a time traveler prevents his own parents from meeting, therefore he immediately ceases to exist:

in a single continuous timeline, the fact that he exists means that his parents were not prevented from meeting;

in a single discontinuous timeline, a time traveler arriving from nowhen, like a macroscopic quantum event, can prevent the man and woman who would otherwise have been his parents from meeting but there is no reason why he should then cease to exist;

in a multiple timelines scenario, the time traveler can be born in timeline 1 and prevent his own birth in timeline 2 and should continue to exist;

in no timeline can a potential person whose parents did not meet exist into adulthood, then cease to exist.

See The Logic of Time Travel, Part I.

Poul Anderson either avoids such non sequiturs completely, e.g., in There Will Be Time, or conceals them carefully, i.e., in his Time Patrol series. The classic sf howler is getting the science wrong. Examples can be cited from other authors' works.

A few posts ago, here, I referred to Edmund Cooper's Seed Of Light. I borrowed this book as well as Anderson's Guardians Of Time and Robert Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky, from the Public Library in Penrith, Cumberland (now Cumbria) in the early 1960s. Remembering that I had appreciated Cooper's combination of interstellar travel with time travel and also motivated by nostalgia, I have ordered a copy from Amazon and have also reread Damon Knight's review in In Search Of Wonder. Knight highlights howlers that can help us to compare Cooper with Anderson.

Another Concealed Biblical Passage

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 21.

"Then she was kissing him and he was kissing her and in the ceiling sky display the morning stars sang together." (p. 274)

See Job 38:7.

On reflection, I realized that this phrase was Biblical but would not have been able to quote chapter and verse. How much literary wealth is embedded in Poul Anderson's texts without being recognized as such?

Some Juvenile SF

One scenario:

Children/young people either arrive on or already live on a colonized planet, e.g.:

Robert Heinlein
Red Planet
Farmer In The Sky 

Poul Anderson
"Wingless on Avalon"
"Rescue on Avalon"
"Escape The Morning"
"The Faun"

Julian May
Diamond Mask 

Comments
There are many other examples.
There is a sense of adventure.
Young readers easily identify with the characters.
Julian May knowingly incorporates this juvenile element into an adult novel.
CS Lewis' The Horse And His Boy, set not on another planet but in a "magical" other world, is nevertheless recognizably Heinleinian.
Such reflections are prompted by current reading, in this case May, but have a wider significance.

Xanadu

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 21.

On Mars, Fenn and Kinna visit "Xanadu Gardens" (p. 266) where they ride a boat along "Alph the Sacred River." (p. 273) so let us reread the original:

Kubla Khan

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

   Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round;

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

   The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves;

   Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

   Could I revive within me

   Her symphony and song,

   To such a deep delight ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Interstellar Travel And Time Travel

Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time, XVI.

I have overlooked or downplayed a point in There Will Be Time. Previously, I had reflected that time travelers would be able to move pastward or futureward along the world-line of a slower than light interstellar spaceship - and I think that this or something like it did happen in Edmund Cooper's Seed Of Light which I read many years ago. Poul Anderson presents the idea at least of futureward travel in an STL ship in the concluding chapter of There Will Be Time but also writes:

"'Physicists talk about a mathematical equivalence between traveling into the past and flying faster than light.'" (p. 174)

Thus, although I had thought that the future of There Will Be Time involves a combination of time travel and STL interstellar travel, it is also possible that, in this future, the datum of mutant time travelers enables physicists to conceptualize, then realize, FTL interstellar travel. What might a sequel have been like?

And I said most of this in 2012: see Time Travel And Space Travel.

The future society built by the time travelers is culturally wealthy because it welcomes alien "'...starfarers...'" (p. 175) not only for their material goods but more for:

"'Ideas, arts, experience, insights born on a thousand different worlds, out of a thousand different kinds of being...'" (ibid.)

Maurai society, post-nuclear but pre-time-travel, had developed philosophers and mystics who think, feel, seek meanings and ask challenging questions. However, thought requires subject matter which must come from outside. Thus, the Star Masters civilization synthesizes successive social stages.

"All Shall Be Well" II

"'That on the Last Day, not only will our dead be resurrected, but all that ever was, ever lived, to the glory of God.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Merman's Children (London, 1981), Epilogue, p. 258.

"She had gone to join the great Mind of the Universe...together with all the creatures that had ever lived, in the special and very mysterious way that God had planned."
-Julian May, Diamond Mask (London, 1995), 8, p. 146.

See "All Shall Be Well."

Saints

Thank you all for, so far, 499 pageviews on a day when there has been no blog post until this one. I have been with a friend in Arnside. I am not one of the saints referred to by the title of this blog.

As one brief remark for today, which sf series am I describing? -

there is a threat of rebellion in an interstellar civilization;
the heroine of a novel dies violently;
she is subsequently canonized.

Clue: The blog title is "Saints," not "Saint," so look for two series answering this description.

Addendum: 512 pageviews by midnight.

Capitals

See Merseian And Terran Capitals. (The links in this link could be better edited but not tonight.)

Julian May's capital city of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu bears comparison with Poul Anderson's Admiralty Center and Archopolis.

May's Concord (Diamond Mask, 7):

is beside Old Concord, New Hampshire;

spreads across the Merrimack River valley;

holds many new offices in its enormous underground "Ant's Nest," carved out of the rock;

is served by officials and workers commuting through "...a maze of high-speed subways..." (p. 118) from villages in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine;

houses its high level bureaucrats, including the First Magnate, in its parklands.

Subtler Wars, Part III

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 19.

This post makes senses only as a continuation of Subtler Wars, Part II.

A Proserpinan spaceship approaches the Elnath observatory and launches three well-programmed, versatile robots, each equipped with "...sensors and effectors..." (p. 240) and subject to override by the watching spaceship crew. The robots should be able to enter the observatory and readout the prohibited data. Although the expedition was planned and prepared for years with maximum security, the ship had been detectable by radar almost from departure. High intensity electromagnetic impulses from the observatory disable the robots, which drift away. The sophotect directing the observatory warns the Proserpinans by radio that, if they do not depart, then an approaching armed ship will destroy them. At last this war has become recognizable as such.

When download Guthrie came to Proserpina, Luaine of the Outer Comets lobbied for the Proserpinans to refuel his ship with antimatter. Her plan is:

a Lunarian in a spacesuit modified so that it will not be disabled by the electromagnetic field enters the observatory and switches off the field;

then, download Guthrie, fast enough to evade or outfight the guardian ships, approaches and enters the observatory to readout the prohibited data.

However, download Guthrie wants to spy in the inner Solar System before considering an assault on the observatory and has the backing of two other Selenarchs. Thus, he prevents coercion by Luaine. Again, armed conflict threatens to return.

Subtler Wars, Part II

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 19.

Gravity curves the paths of electromagnetic waves as well as of bodies. Galaxies generate multiple enhanced images of objects behind them. (Why enhanced?) Dark bodies can be detected by their distortion of the light from more distant stars. Gravitational lenses include the sun which, being nearly spherical, "...has little aberration." (p. 232)

Observatories at the "focal points" (ibid.), 550 a.u.'s out, as far away as "...the Kuiper Belt, although not necessarily in the same plane..." (p. 233), detect distant objects beyond the sun and transmit the data to Earth. Remote signals are too faint and sweep by too fast for the instruments to catch enough photons for optical images but radio waves suffice. An observatory in Taurus just south of the star, Elnath:

"...would be on a line between Sol and the center of the galaxy. It would be looking at hordes of stars." (p. 234)

I imagine that the sun would be between the observatory and the galactic center, not the observatory between the sun and the center?

Fireball put observatories in several sectors, including one in Taurus near Elnath. Locating many extra-solar planets and analyzing their atmospheres, the instruments found very few with free oxygen so interest flagged, then Fireball came to an end and the observatories decayed.

Meanwhile, the equation that explained every law of physics had been found:

"Its solutions described the origin and ultimate fate of all that was, all that could ever be." (p. 235)

Any possible observation now has a basic explanation although chaos and complexity prevent most calculations and only the Teramind fully understands most solutions. Most human scientists come to regard the remaining unexpected data as trivial although the cybercosm continues to investigate and establishes new solar lenses, replacing "...the old, dead observatories..." (p. 236) with forty new, improved versions, each with its own power source, maintainence and conscious directing intelligence.

Human scientists receiving the data find nothing to contradict the great equation but nevertheless map the universe in space and time until the data stream becomes unintelligible. The cybercosm, claiming not to understand this development, now restricts reports from the lenses only to sophotects. Proserpinans, not to be fobbed off, collect all the data that had been published from the lenses and identify the Elnath observatory as the source of the anomalies. The Selenarchs spend years to build and launch a lens whose carrier is wrecked by an improbable collision with a rock moving so fast that it must, even less probably, have come from outside the Solar System. Decades later, their second lens, reaching its intended orbit, fails to function and has to be transported back for examination since the Proserpinans refuse to use sophotects that could operate on the spot. The cause was a defect that should have been detected during pre-launch inspections. The Proserpinans suspect small robotic saboteurs and know that they can be spied on by similar means.

This has become a war and will escalate.

Subtler Wars

Ideological conflicts in high tech futures might be so subtle as scarcely to be recognizable as such. In Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars, the machines mean not to murder or massacre but merely to mislead. If, which I do not believe, post-organic intelligences were to regard the cosmic proliferation of humanity as chaotic (granted), therefore problematic (why?), then extermination would be the simplest "solution," indeed a "final" one. See Berserkers and Another Berserker.

However, the cybercosm has qualms about violence although not about deception leading to demoralization and eventual extinction: same end, sanitized means. I question not the possibility of post-organic intelligences but the premise that this kind of conflict would arise between post-organics and organics.

In "Subtler Wars, Part II," we will consider the details of how this war by other means is waged.

The Bible And Beyond

Here, we moved from Shakespearean to Biblical phrases in works by Poul Anderson. Next, we move to a Biblical phrase in a work by Julian May and thence to passages in works by James Blish and Poul Anderson.

The Family Ghost tells Fury:

"Do what you must do..."
-Julian May, Jack The Bodiless (London, 1991), 2, p. 41.

Jesus tells Judas:

"Hurry and do what you must!" (Jn. 13:27)

The Family Ghost, a time traveler, knows that Fury's evil actions cannot be prevented and also tells Rogi to arrange a meeting between a couple who must marry and have children. In Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, the Service, knowing the future, supervises meetings between couples who must marry and have children. Similarly, Anderson's Time Patrol intervenes to ensure that its history comes to pass and therefore would arrange marriages if necessary. If only we could have some foreknowledge...

Avalon

Avalon is:

an Arthurian island;

a terrestroid planet jointly colonized by human beings and Ythrians in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization;

a terrestroid planet colonized by human beings in Julian May's Galactic Milieu.

I saw a reference to "Avalon" somewhere in the Galactic Milieu Trilogy but now cannot find it so would welcome any information from blog readers. However, there is probably no direct connection or cross-reference between Anderson's and May's Avalons.

Shakespeare And The Bible

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 19.

We mentioned a Shakespearean phrase embedded in a Poul Anderson text. See The Winter Of Our Discontent. We also look out for Biblical phrases:

"...what promise, which the Teramind did not want humans to know of, lest they become like it?" (p. 237)

"'God said that, because he knows that when you eat it you will be like God...'" (Gen. 3:5)

In fact, the Teramind is not concealing a source of divine power but practicing a major deception, so that another Biblical phrase becomes appropriate:

"...the father of lies." (Jn. 8:4)

Quick posts today. We are attending the Green Party Christmas Fair again. See A Prayer.

Addendum: This evening, unexpectedly, I drove around Morecambe Bay for a meal with two former work colleagues and had no further time for blogging. We were at the Dickensian Festival.

Robots And The Cosmos

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 18-19.

"As for safety, the software in the robot, which could not be altered or replaced without triggering a burnout of the robot itself, would never obey an order that had any reasonable probability of endangering others." (18, p. 225)

Asimov's Second Law of Robotics.

"...the low seething of the cosmos..." (19, p. 228)

Yet another description of background radio noise. See Dry Cosmic Hiss.

Breakfast post. Busy today.

Metacoercion

See:

Kinds Of Telepathy
A Conceptual Error
In My Mind

In Julian May's Diamond Mask:

"Fury said: <Give Jack the machine's comset.>
"Marc blinked, then uttered a weary expletive and handed over the command headset to the little boy." (2, p. 24)

"...her mental screen was understandably a bit woolly at first, easily penetrated by the subtle coercive-redactive ream that the Hydra knew how to use so well. The idea for taking a brief holiday that came stealing into her mind through the tiny aperture was both gratifying and pleasant, and Masha accepted it as her own without demur.
"Hydra withdrew from the professor's unconscious..." (3, p. 43)

We speculated about mental coercion. Julian May describes it in detail. Poul Anderson describes space combat as if he were a veteran. Julian May is equally convincing about metapsychic powers.

Weather

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 15.

Weather Control directs energy beams from space to divert a hurricane away from anywhere that it might cause serious damage. However, the new course cannot be fully predicted. An unsinkable floating island responds to the weather like a giant organism, suffering harm only to gardens and parks.

The chapter ends with a Pathetic Fallacy. Fenn plans to catch He'o's murderer:

"'Time for tracking Pedro Dover down.'
"The storm yelled." (p. 194)

Anderson fans might remember a hurricane in an earlier future history. See Man Versus Nature.

Being Civilized

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 14.

"Some people didn't take to being civilized; their DNA wasn't right for it." (p. 185)

This is the old and protean enemy of Anderson's first future history. See here. But how different are the two future histories! The Psychotechnic History has native Martians, a colonized Venus, psychotechnics and FTL whereas the Harvest of Stars history has Lunarians, personality downloads, the cybercosm and Life Mothers.

Is there a conflict between (some) human DNA and civilization? I saw a TV discussion that counterposed violent humanity and peaceful civilization but this is another false dichotomy. It is the humanity that has built the civilization and the civilization that generates violence so there is peace in the humanity and violence in the civilization. Opposites interpenetrate.

More Flecker

We have found James Elroy Flecker quoted by Poul Anderson, SM Stirling and Neil Gaiman.

In Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars:

Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:
Fire in the night, O dreams!
Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
South to the desert, east to ocean, north to snow,
West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go
Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.
-copied from here.

Anderson quotes these lines between DRAMATIS PERSONAE and Chapter 1, p. 1, but he has "my children" where Flecker has "my country."

"We travel not for trafficking alone;
"By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
"For lust of knowing what should not be known,
"We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."
-quoted in 13, p. 157.

This stanza was recently discussed in the combox.

A False Dichotomy

Some sf, like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars Tetralogy, presents what I think is a false dichotomy: social stasis versus dangerous and potentially destructive dynamism. The word "peace" has become tainted. It connotes passivity, placidity etc whereas, of course, human beings can be dynamic and creative without engaging in armed conflict.

The third option, open to a civilization with scientific knowledge, high technology and self-understanding, is creative dynamism. The future should remain unpredictable but there should no longer be any reason to fear destruction of the material base of society.

Villainous Motivations

What do sf villains want? It is not always power for its own sake and even that cliche takes different forms. HG Wells' Martians needed a food source. Dan Dare's Mekon wanted to experiment on entire species. EE Smith's Eddorians each wanted to exercise individual power over many inhabited planets so they cooperated with each other, under an absolute dictator, to achieve that goal.

Poul Anderson's Merseians, valuing the species over the individual and recognizing that the galaxy cannot be ruled from a single point, aim at a number of autonomous Merseian realms. They do not want to rule by the continual application of force. Domesticable species will serve willingly. Others will be exterminated. Sean Brooks compared the Merseians with SM Stirling's Draka. (See "WAS THE DOMINATION INSPIRED BY MERSEIA," dated Friday, 28 November 2018, on the Poul Anderson: Contributor Articles blog, which is here. For the article itself, see here. The article was originally published here, where it has received more comments.) Merseians will value human courage, ingenuity etc as long as it is subordinate to them. Stirling's Count Ignatieff devoutly worships a demon.

Julian May's mental monster, Fury, hating aliens and despising altruists, aims to replace the Galactic Milieu with a "Second Milieu," presumably ruled by him through his depraved human agents.

Daleks want power.

Addendum: Should I have mentioned Isaac Asimov's Mule, an alienated mutant hitting back at humanity with his hypnotic telepathy but fortunately not leaving an heir?

Addendum II: I also forgot Larry Niven's kzinti who want to enslave and eat other species which makes them comparable to Wells' Martians except that the feline kzinti stalk, chase and kill whereas the physically debilitated Martians extract blood and inject it into themselves. They are more like the Daleks since they travel in protective machines and conquer London.

Evolution

Is evolution directional? I don't think so. Organisms on a planetary surface will not inevitably become conscious, then intelligent. These qualities will evolve only if they are naturally selected.

Poul Anderson's The Night Face/Let The Spacemen Beware and "Starfog," feature human beings who have adapted to extraterrestrial environments and therefore have gradually "speciated." These speciations would not have been predictable millions of years beforehand.

In Diamond Mask, Julian May tells us that, millions of years hence, human beings will, like Jon "Jack the Bodiless" Remillard, become Mental Men. Born incarnate, they will soon shed their bodies to become naked brains exercising the metapsychic abilities of telepathy, creativity, psychokinesis etc - but how could it be known in advance that such a transformation was going to happen?

Turning The Page

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 13.

Sometimes, the act of turning the page is part of the process of reading a text. A friend once told me that he read a novel where, several times, the text continued to the bottom of a right hand page, then, on turning the page, he found that the next page began with a change of scene. He added that this happened too often to be a coincidence. Someone had designed the book to coordinate turnings of the page with changes of scene.

It is impossible to know whether the following single example is merely a coincidence. It is not a change of scene but something more dramatic. Poul Anderson has made us care about the intelligent seal, He'o.

The concluding two lines of p. 159:

"His whiskers quivered. 'I, though, I am going home to
my sea.'"

The opening two lines of p. 160:

"Thunder smote. His skull exploded. Blood and brains
fountained."

Maybe the pagination differs in other editions?

Life has become busier. I need exercise and have evening commitments. So far this month, I have averaged seven posts per day but that might be about to slow down.

Many Mansions In Fiction And Philosophy

Poul Anderson
Operation Chaos: Heaven and Hell.
"Pact": demons in Hell.
"Dead Phone": a hinted hereafter.
"The Martyr": immortal souls for the enigmatic aliens but not for human beings.

James Blish
Black Easter and The Day After Judgment: Hell wins the War with unexpected results.

CS Lewis
The Great Divorce: an imaginative and original account of a hereafter.
Narnia: Aslan's country.

SM Stirling
The Emberverse: a Heaven where time runs differently; also, a Purgatory.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Inferno and Escape From Hell: Dante's Inferno updated.

Julian May
Diamond Mask: "...the peace and light of the Cosmic All..." (PROLOGUE, p. 10)

A philosopher with whom I recently corresponded
We enter the hereafter temporarily in dreams and permanently after death.

Fictional Historians

Rogatien Remillard is the historian of the Intervention and the Galactic Milieu as Hloch is of the Polesotechnic League and its influence on his species, the Ythrians. In both cases, fictional history is filtered through a single, unifying character although, of course, there are also major differences. Hloch comes on stage only in the interstitial passages of The Earth Book Of Stormgate whereas Rogi is sometimes the first person narrator and, at other times, only one of the many third person characters in Julian May's future historical narrative.

The later part of the Technic History lacks a comparable narrator although, despite this, Dominic Flandry and, in just one passage, Chunderban Desai do articulate their commentaries on historical processes. Their civilization moves towards not greater unification but an almost inevitable collapse. Aesthetically, we appreciate either optimism or pessimism in speculative fiction.

Telepathy In Interstellar Civilizations

See Two Interstellar Civilizations.

In Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy, telepathy and other metapsychic abilities are powerful enough to unite the interstellar civilization whereas, in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, telepathy is extremely weak except in one species, the Chereionites, who work against the Terran Empire. In James Blish's "This Earth of Hours," telepathy unites the galactic Central Empire which spreads out along the spiral arms where it will come into conflict with the Terrestrial Matriarchy.

There are other examples, of course - for example, Isaac Asimov's mutant Mule and Second Foundation contend by using the mental power of hypnotic telepathy (?) - but I particularly commend Anderson, Blish and May as writers about interstellar civilizations.

Two Interstellar Civilizations

Poul Anderson's Terran Empire and Julian May's Galactic Milieu are two multi-species, interstellar civilizations with faster than light travel. The human race rules the Empire whereas it has only recently been inducted into the Milieu. However, humanity:

is specially favored by the superior Lylmik race;
will become more powerful than the other Milieu races;
will rebel against the Milieu -

- and, thanks to time travel, there is a unique relationship between the leader of the Metapsychic Rebellion and the chief Lylmik.

Thus, both series perpetuate the old American sf premise that humanity is not insignificant but instead will play a leading role on the galactic stage. Anderson, of course, also explored other options.

In London

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 12.

Fenn and Wanika visit antiquarian London where they walk in Hyde Park and drink beer in a pub.  In addition to experiencing this preserved reality, they might also have met virtual reconstructions of:

William the Conqueror
Elizabeth the First
Winston Churchill
Diana Leigh (?)
Chaucer
Shakespeare
Pepys
Kipling
Wells
Newton
Faraday
Medawar
Moll Flanders
Wilkins Micawber
Sherlock Holmes

Reading this list, we, or at least I, go through the following thought process:

(i) But the last three are fictional;
(ii) yes but, if virtual reconstructions are possible, then they might just as well be of fictional characters as of historical figures;
(iii) also, Sherlock Holmes is real in the Time Patrol timeline so maybe he is also real in the Harvest of Stars timeline?;
(iv) we are probably not meant to think (iii) but who knows?

Ground And Clouds

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 10-11.

The Lahui Kuikawa, a mixed human-intelligent seal community, asks Fenn's advice about colonizing Deimos, then terraforming Mars. To be able to give such advice, he must visit first the Pacific, then Mars:

"'...when we're reaching for the truth, our feet had better be planted on rocky reality.'" (10, p. 135)

Paradox: to plant his feet on Martian ground, Fenn must travel into the sky. This prompts a philosophical reflection: someone with his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground must be very tall. Metaphorically, Poul Anderson, creating scientifically grounded and imaginatively transcendent speculative fiction, was many light years tall.

Omnibus Volumes

Baen Books have published Poul Anderson's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, in seven uniform omnibus volumes as The Technic Civilization Saga, compiled by Hank Davis.

Isaac Asimov has a parallel series:

The End Of Eternity, poor though that is as a time travel novel;

those Robot short stories that can be regarded as consistent with his future history;

the four Robot novels;

the three Galactic Empire novels;

the two pre-Foundation novels;

the original Foundation series;

the two later Foundation novels.

There are also additional volumes, e.g., a Robots Trilogy and a Second Foundation Trilogy, by other authors.

Asimov's series is better known but Anderson's is better written.

Uncle Rogi And Poul Anderson

Rogatien Remillard, second hand fantasy and sf bookseller in 2054:

"'I've had enough grief this week already, what with getting outbid on a Robinson-mint March 1952 Planet Stories, with Poul Anderson's "Captive of the Centaurianess" on the cover...'"
-Julian May, Jack The Bodiless (London, 1992), 39, p. 448.

What does "Robinson-mint" mean?

Inrai Demands

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 9.

Threedom sovereignty throughout Tharsis;

alliance with Prosrepina;

a sovereign (Lunarian) Mars;

return of Luna to the Lunarians;

full disclosure of astronomical discoveries by the solar lens and of the destinations of the new light-speed ships.

When Kinna hears the fourth demand, she thinks:

"...irrendentism..." (p. 124)

See Italia Irredenta.

Contrast The Johnnies' Demands.

The Winter Of Our Discontent

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 9.

"...the latter-day winter of discontent fell also on Mars." (p. 116)

Little bits of Shakespeare creep in everywhere. Do we always recognize them?

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;

And now, instead of mounting barded steeds

To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,

He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;

I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,

Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the king

In deadly hate the one against the other:

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle, false and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,

About a prophecy, which says that 'G'

Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.

Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here

Clarence comes.

-copied from here.

The Threedom

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 9.

Terrans and Lunarians settled on Mars for profit, honor or achievement. In addition, some Terrans were political dissenters whereas some Lunarians were in blood-feuds. Initially, Lunarians were more numerous. A Selenarchy might have arisen not to terraform but to lunaform Mars. However, Terrans bred faster, Mars joined the Federation and began its decline.

There was a "Lyudov Rebellion" (p. 116) on Earth. This is one of those future historical events that remain off-stage so that we have to deduce what we can (not much) about it. It instigated three Lunarian towns, the Threedom, Arainn, Layadi and Daunan, in the Tharsis region, to declare independence. After the Rebellion, they disarmed and remained peaceful but did not recognize either the Federation or its successor, the Synesis, refusing to participate in elections or data collection. When discontent grew on Mars, Lunarians from the Threedom and elsewhere made weapons and went into the wilderness. Is their name significant: Inrai - InRaI?

Rebels

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 9.

Elverir flies Kinna to Tharshis to meet the Inrai, Lunarian rebels and outlaws who:

rob caravans;
wreck machines;
kill sophotects and men.

Is this feasible on a colonized Mars?

It is not as far from our experience as you might expect. I attended secondary school and University in the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s and early '70s which means that I met people who waged war against the British presence in Northern Ireland. Half a dozen big shops were fire-bombed in Sheila's home town in the North while we were there. My mother, from the West of Ireland but living in respectable English society, had some heated exchanges with neighbors about Irish history. My politics were shifting almost imperceptibly but not towards armed struggle.

We enjoy recognizing familiar kinds of problems and conflicts in exotic settings. See:

Exotica And Mirrors
A Fantastic World

News From The Stars

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 8.

"'The news from the stars has touched everyone in the Solar System...'" (p. 107)

Downloaded human personalitites, integrated with a planetary ecology, have become a "Life Mother," guiding and directing the terraforming of a planet. A Life Mother has also been able to transfer a downloaded personality into a body newly grown from the original person's DNA. Thirdly, near light speed spaceships have been developed. Thus, both extra-solar colonization and immortality have become feasible. Although the first "resurrections" were performed by a Life Mother, does a Life Mother remain necessary for this process? If not, then immortality might be even closer.

A community of human beings and intelligent seals based in the Pacific now hopes to terraform Mars.The cybercosm resists sudden social or technological revolutions but change edges closer, nevertheless.

Consciousness And Morality

Poul Anderson, The Fleet Of Stars, 7.

Chuan tells Kinna that morality is the reverence of consciousness for consciousness. I agree although, since only consciousness can feel reverence, it suffices to say that morality is reverence for consciousness. Chuan deduces that sophotectic consciousness wants neither to crush nor to confine human minds but to help them to grow. This would involve neither deceiving nor misleading human beings but helping them towards knowledge and understanding.

Later in this chapter, the cybercosm tells Chuan a secret and we learn near the end of the novel what the secret is. The cybercosm plans to mislead mankind with an elaborate and massive deception. In the light of Chuang's definition of morality and also of his deduction from it, I question whether the cybercosm would do this.

Bodiless Brain And Mental Man

See Scientific Survival.

CS Lewis: a guillotined head kept alive by scientific apparatus;

James Blish: a brain kept alive in a case;

Poul Anderson: a personality downloaded into an artificial neural network.

First the head, then the brain, then the personality.

Julian May adds another brain. Jon Remillard's cancerous body must be systematically amputated until all that is left is an artificially maintained brain, communicating telepathically. Then that brain psychokinetically creates a body around it. Jack is a prochronistic Mental Man. I should have included him in "Scientific Survival."

Connecticut

Let us close today with sfnal references to Connecticut.

(i) Connecticut is in Poul Anderson's The Byworlder. See here.

(ii) We have referred to A Connecticut Yankee... as a precursor of Anderson's Time Patrol. See here.

(iii) Robert Heinlein's time travel novel, The Door Into Summer, opens:

"One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut."
-Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1970), One, p. 7.

(iv) Julian May's mega-series of time travel and Metapsychic Rebellion includes this passage:

"...a region of ancient pine trees and other evergreens called Pine Park. Until the Metapsychic Rebellion, the place was also one of my favorite walks, an undisturbed fragment of New England forest growing along the bank of the great Connecticut River."
-Julian May, Jack The Bodiless (London, 1992), 36, pp.423-424.

I think that some such references are homages to Mark Twain.